Daily Loaf

The GammaTesting.com guys dive deep into this ’90’s-era, comic-inspired, morally-devoid, open-world, super-dude action game and revel in the freedom of movement and wide range of epic combat options. Of course, no amount of car-throwing, copter-jacking or disease-tendrilizing can overcome brutal and blatantly manipulative boss fights, like the final one in Prototype.

Still, epic is good. Listen up! (Then check out all the other Gamma Testing episodes.)

Gamma Testing Podcast Ep15: Prototype

It’s hard to feel guilty when people don’t even bother to move out of the way of your tank when it’s about to run them over. That’s good, because Prototype is a game that clearly doesn’t want you to be thinking too much about innocent bystanders, especially if doing so would get in the way of tearing the hell out of anything and everything around you. Still, even I felt a twinge of discomfort while going for the achievement points for running over 500 people with a single tank. In retrospect, this actually works within the convoluted framework of Prototype’s story, but at the time it was just one more way of causing mayhem. Prototype’s all about the mayhem.

You play as Alex, a scientist who always wears a hoodie for some unexplained reason, and who has been infected by a virus that’s quickly turning him into a monster/superhero. And of course you have amnesia. So you’ve got to find out who did this to you while Manhattan dissolves into a chaos of nasty soldiers and even nastier infected who’re constantly attacking each other and you. You get to tear your way through both sides in a blood filled, high speed romp up and down the length of the city as you unlock the secrets of your recent past and search for who’s responsible. If the story sounds typical and uninspired, that’s because it is – amnesia, virus, shadowy government agency, trust no one, and did I mention amnesia? Blah, blah, blah. We’ve seen it all before. Protoype’s setting and story don’t break any new ground and are almost throwaway.

But it’s not the why’s and therefore’s that draw you into Prototype – it’s what you do. Read the rest of this entry »